The Easey Street Murders Bonus Episode - The latest on the case

0:00A warning for listeners that this series contains graphic details, including references to murder and rape. Hi everyone, it's Olivia Jenkins here, the host of the latest season of Hunting Justice and we're back with a quick update episode for you all with some developments that have happened in court. So if you haven't caught up on our first six episodes, make sure you go back and hit play on those. So you don't get any spoilers in this episode or everything that we are going to discuss in this episode, make sense. So first we wanted to update you about some proceedings in the Melbourne Supreme Court this week. If you have listened to the series so far, you would have heard us say that Perry Corumbless, the man charged with murdering Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett in Collingwood in 1977, was also initially charged with the rape, but that rape charge was struck out by a magistrate during a committal hearing, which is where it was determined that he would stand trial

1:01for their murders. This week he returned to court, but he returned to the Supreme Court where the rape charge was reinstated in addition to the two murder charges. We can't tell you about all of the specifics out of that hearing this week, but what we can say is that the rape charge, which was referred to in the 70s as Colonel Knowledge, is back on Perry's indictment. Now this development comes a few months after the committal hearing you might have heard a bit about throughout the series so far, where a magistrate determined that Perry would stand trial for the murders. That rape charge was initially struck out at Perry Corumbless's committal hearing late last year. My colleague Ash Argoon covered this week's most recent hearing for the Herald Sun, and she's reported that previously during the committal hearing for Perry, the court heard discussion over whether the alleged rape occurred before or after Sue Armstrong died. And back then, there was no alternate charge

2:01such as interfering with the corpse, available in the 70s. And so the magistrate decided to dismiss that charge. But as Ash reported this week, it's understood that the Colonel Knowledge Charge was filed on indictment paperwork to the Supreme Court just in the last few weeks. Perry's likely to return to court over the next few months for a series of administrative hearings, including filing formal defense for that rape charge and pre-trial hearings, because no date has officially been set for his trial. So this might be the last that you hear from us for a little while, but we will bring you all of the updates on the case on this feed. In the meantime, if you want all of the news about this case and crime in Melbourne, you can go to heraldsun.com.au or if you're interested in checking out our video documentary series about these murders, you can go to huntingjustice.com.au and they'll be posted on YouTube.